In a previous post, I made the statement that there are three paths a customer can take when trying to deploy video throughout their company: Build, Buy or Subscribe.  The question is, what would drive a customer to choose one of these paths over the others.

In this post, I’ll give you my take on why a company would choose to build their own video solution, buying their own cameras, intalling their own service and maybe even building their own DVRs.

From my experience in the marketplace over the past few years, there are a couple of different cases where customes have decided to build it themselves.  If you fit one of these cases, maybe you should consider building a video system yourself.

You aren’t going to use it. You may think I’m being snide, but I’m not.  If you don’t plan on actually using your video system and you are really only looking to put up cameras as an insurance policy in case something terrible happens, then you can probably get by with a homegrown, quick and dirty system.  Go buy a couple cameras from Best Buy or another electronics store, use your existing PC and find some IP camera software somewhere, hang the cameras, pull the cable and you are good to go.  You get the added benefit of potentially detering bad activiity by having the cameras up there at all.  Since you are never really using the system you don’t care about remote access, about ease of use, about features or return on investment (because you know you won’t get one)  It is only an insurance policy and you are good with that.  Just make sure it is on all the time (See Michael Wilson’s post on checking the children)

You REALLY love technology.  This is a case that fortunately I’ve only encountered twice in my tenure in the industry.  I say fortunately b/c in my opinion this type of customer is not motivated by economics or logic as much as they have an emotional or philosophical bias to own that a service provider will struggle to change.  The clearest example of this was a well-known trendy hamburger franchise that put out an RFP for a video system for a couple hundred sites.  We were pretty excited about the opportunity until it became clear what they were doing.  They had scoped out the highest end system I had seen.  They wanted to buy everything themselves (high end Dell servers for the DVRs, top of the line Axis IP cameras, crazy amounts of storage, the whole 9 yards)  Normally I would say that all of this is a good thing for a MVaaS provider, as the value we provide is in the software and the network, not the equipment.  Unfortunately, in this case they had spent so much on this expensive gear that they had only a few hundred dollars per site left in their budget for the software.  They couldn’t find a software provider willing to provide them service with those economics so I believe they built something on their own.  (Side note: I’m not an audiophile, but this seems to me like buying the highest end speakers available and then plugging them into a do-it-yourself ham radio).  You don’t see a lot of these folks around b/c you have to have a lot of extra cash and the IT group has to have an incredible amount of discretion and control (not to mention resources) to be able to pull this off.

You have a need the market can’t address.  This sounds reasonable in theory, if the market can’t provide the functionality you think you need – just figure it out yourself and develop a solution that fits your exact needs.  Having said that, I would argue that only a few companies have the capability to actually do this.  You have to have a lot of resources and expertise to build new capabilities.  The only companies I’ve seen fit this even a little bit were really working with a service provider to get them to customize the providers solution to fit unique requirements, not really building it themselves from scratch.

If you can think of other reasons why a company should want to build their own solution, let me know.